Mindscape

I need to stop reading IMDb reviews for this type of movie. I skipped all the ones who had possible spoiler alerts, but everyone else saying you had figured it out before he did, and the last 20 minutes are useless and so forth did jade me. And reading the reviews did a funny thing, I thought I knew exactly what was going on and I was wrong. So I guess reading the reviews gave me the wrong ideas. Which was actually quite funny because I kept waiting for my version to come down and it never did. So I missed the obvious because I was sure that was not the story. Okay the movie was enjoyable. It was well done. It was a fun thriller/mystery. I thought the acting was good. I liked the concept, and I think I may of really liked it better if I did not read the reviews first. It is not sci fi at all, just the idea of going into someones memories is a cool concept, but the movie was a straight up mystery/thriller. Just watch it and enjoy it with a bag of popcorn and have fun!

Anna, or Mindscape as the original title goes, rides heavily on the presence and acting capabilities of its two main leads, Mark Strong as John, a psychologist with mind reading abilities, and Taissa Farmiga as Anna, his young and eerily disturbed patient. The film itself revolves around the idea that certain humans have developed their latent psychic abilities to such a degree that they can read the minds of others and thus help them overcome traumas and illnesses of the mind. Yeah, it's a bit Inception-esque, but it's different enough in style and atmosphere that you won't mind.

Still, the best part about this film is Mark Strong. His quiet dignified performance holds almost all of the scenes together and his interactions with Farmiga are very interesting to witness. Farmiga's performance suffers a touch from her relative inexperience, at least compared to Strong. You can definitely tell that she's acting in the earlier scenes, but she gets better quickly and her character as a whole nails the eery wonder child trope.

Plot-wise the film is nothing special, being relatively easy to predict and offering no real twists, but it's more of a moodpiece in any case. I would have liked for the actual mindscape scenes to be a bit more creative and the story as a whole to be a bit more overreaching in scope, but those lacks only mean that the film is merely good instead of great.

Mindscape is worth a watch if you're looking for a thriller with a more thoughtful tone and lacking in excessive brutality and gore.

This movie has one of the best openings ever, thrilling,containing a lot of suspense and well directed, which could also be said about the movie as a whole. The lead actors were quite excellent as well. The movie effortlessly keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout...going into one dimension into another,demanding your focus and attention. So it isn't wishful thinking to expect a great ending leaving an impact on you, but I guess it was. The series of plots and twists in the movie can become a bit too much towards the middle,but it gets on its track later...only to fall over a cliff and crash into the ground at the end. Yep,that's how bad it gets!! Psychological thrillers require a bit of in-depth thinking and attention to enjoy and so does 'Anna'...a great ending could have made this movie a masterpiece but it wasn't meant to be. I would still recommend it if you are into psychological thrillers but do not have high expectations.

Mindscape, given the less tantalizing title 'Anna' upon release, is a thinking person's thriller, and perhaps a little bit too much so. In the near future, or perhaps some alternate reality, some humans have evolved into pseudo clairvoyants who can enter the memories of other people and interact with their subjects within them. This talent has been trademarked by law enforcement, who employ 'memory detectives' to psychologically resolve conflict or retrieve otherwise out of reach information. Mark Strong is one such man, but his talents have dimmed a bit following the deaths of his family and a crippling stroke. Hauled out of retirement by his former boss (Brian Cox, sly as ever), he finds himself tasked with navigating the labyrinthine mind of Anna (Taissa Farmiga) a girl accused of murder and deemed a potential sociopath pending diagnosis. The film is deliberately dense and elliptical, not standard Hollywood fare at all, which is nice to see, but it also trips just a little bit on its own cognitive aspirations, especially in the third act. It's one of those pieces that's less like The Cell, and more like Vanilla Sky or Danny Boyle's Trance (two absolute favourites of mine) where so much of the story wades through muddy mindgames that at a certain point we think to ourselves 'well who's to say if any of this is actually real if it's gotten so complex', and indeed it's very difficult to piece together what has transpired here, especially with a conclusion that would require multiple viewings to even get an inkling. It's stylish as all hell though, given a clinical, steely grey palette punctuated by flourishes of startling red to show the capacity for violence lurking just out of sight within the opaque and enigmatic human psyche. The acting is top tier as well; Strong is reliably committed and intense, Farmiga is deeply disconcerting as the most fascinating and ambiguous character, showing blossoming talent that I look forward to seeing more of, while Cox steals his scenes as per usual. The film trips over itself a few times and like I said, overly convoluted, but it's one mesmerizing effort for the most part, albeit after a second or third viewing.

Why are all the English actors doing American accents? It's really throwing me off. I feel like they needed to dub Anna's mother's voice in after editing. It's all very bizarre.